Kaleidoscope Essay -- Descriptive Essays

KaleidoscopeSome are transformed just once / And belong their whole lives after in that shape. / Others have a facility for ever-ever-changing themselves as they please. -OvidIt finds its way into my handsthe small kaleidoscopea trinket my grandad passes along to me after finding it at the bottom of his toolbox 1 afternoon. Hold it up to the light, Lauren, he advises me, upon witnessing my attempts to unlock the kaleidoscopes magic by aiming it towards the shadowy pavement. With hands clasped, eyes squinted, and head cocked, I finally sense of touch the colored chips, a glittering lattice of piquant, green, and yellow, stagnantly arranged and defined. Turn it, now, my grandfather orders, smiling. Suddenly, the clear composition unravels. It becomes a moving color war, triangles and rectangles interacting, skirting virtually one another to form patterns that linger only fleetingly before changing again. I gasp, intrigued. Thats the beautiful part, my grandfather observes. Its beautiful when its turning.The challenge of cleaning out my desk drawers in preparation for the imprint to New York results in my stumbling across an old coloring book. I switch through the pages, startled by the number of pictures Id go forth only partially colored. With quick, shaky movements, it seems as if I had simply jumped from shading one image to the next, as if there were roughthing complete about leave the figures incomplete. Sitting at my desk, fourteen years older, I laugh at my rendition of Big Bird, whose characteristically yellow feathers I had made blue and whose feet (I suppose I had decided) were alto countenanceher undeserving of color. And yet I get a sense that thi... ... of wholeness, exclusively the acceptance that Ill always be a work-in-progress that creates the satisfying illusion of completeness.Although ignorant of his own words, my grandfather has gotten it respec t able It is beautiful when its turning. We, as human beings, are not able to ossify what we perceive to be our indistinguishability it will be forever and a day changinga kind of surreal, confounding, and complex reflection of our human experience. We sustain innumerable facets, like little tubes of color that remain separate until some creative force removes all the caps and mixes them together. It is that mlange that initiates a masterpiece of identitya masterpiece that is ever changing and never quite finished, but fulfilling in its progression. And it is precisely this understanding that makes the next stroke of the brush a little bit clearer, the portrait itself a bit more revealing.